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£4,082,195, the value of the gold and silver coin and guano exported, that of the latter amounting to about £105,000. The mineral exports doubled between 1844 and 1852 (rising from 3,618,987 dollars to 7,807,106), up to which last named year the mines of Atacama and Coquimbo had been but. partially worked. In 1857 they had doubled again, and have since gone on increasing in value, with some variations, but not in the same rapid proportion. The mining province of Atacama, and, in particular, the district of Copiapo, from which nearly two-thirds of the Chilean mineral produce are derived, is said to show of late marked signs of exhaustion. In the most northern district of this province is situated the group of silver mines known as La Florida. These mines, which are of recent discovery, extend over a zone some twelve kilometres, and according to the latest accounts are of exceeding richness. At the great coppersmelting works at Guayacan the monthly out-turn of barcopper exceeds £60,000 in value; and of nearly equal importance are the smelting works at Lota, south of Concepcion, nominally belonging to the Lota Coronel Company, but in reality the property of the Cousiño family. At Lota, too, the same family owns the largest coal mines as yet worked in Chile. Coal is found in many parts, especially in the southern coast districts, but unfortunately owing to its inferior quality, and to the heavy cost of extraction, the Chile coal must, for some years to come, compete at a great disadvantage with that brought from Great Britain at nominal freights by sailing vessels in quest of return cargoes. The value of the coal exported between 1844 and 1873 was about £1,064,200.

Concluding Remarks.-Mr. Rumbold not unfairly expresses a hope that the observations contained in his Report will convey the notion of a sober-minded, practical, laborious, well-ordered, and respectably-governed community, standing out in great contrast to the other States of kindred origin and similar institutions spread over the South-American continent. The blessings which Chile enjoys she owes to the pure traditions implanted in her administration by the founders of the Republic; to the preponderating share taken in public affairs by the higher and wealthier class; to the happy eradication of militarism; to the nearly entire absence of those accidental sources of wealth (gold, guano, and nitrate) so lavishly bestowed by Providence on some of her neighbours; to the consequent necessity for strenuous labour rapidly repaid by a bountiful soil; above all, perhaps,

to the neglect of her former masters, which, when she had cast off the yoke, drove her to create everything for herself, and called forth exceptional energies in the nation. Most of these may be summed up in two words-work and shrewd sense (trabajo i cordura).

Thanks largely to the natural advantages of their country, and not a little too to foreign-mostly English-energy and assistance, the Chilean people have now attained a remarkable degree of prosperity; but Mr. Rumbold points out that they have of late shown signs of the intoxicating effects of good fortune, and this is exhibited in the fact that they are bent (the Government and upper classes setting the example) rather on decorating and beautifying their house than on setting it in more perfect order. A first visit to the city of Santiago, he says, cannot but be matter of agreeable surprise to an intelligent European; but after a more lengthened stay the ambitious growth and luxury of the town will probably seem to him out of due proportion to the power and resources of the country of which it is the capital. One is, indeed, scarcely prepared to find 90 miles inland, at the foot of the Andes, a city of some 160,000 inhabitants, with such handsome public bulidings, stately dwelling-houses, and exceptionally fine promenades. On this subject the reader will find, in Mr. Rumbold's report, some further particulars of interest, to which want of space alone precludes us from referring in greater detail.

To conclude:-The opening years of the century were wont to see an anxious crowd watching at Valparaiso for the first sight of the ship which, at intervals during the year, was sent down from Peru to that port with supplies and luxuries commensurate with the wants of a needy outlying province. The same port saw close upon 3000 vessels -one-third of them steamers-entering and leaving it in 1874, while over 11,600 vessels traded in the year in all the harbours of the Republic. In the same year it was reckoned that the value of the capital in land throughout the country amounted to 666,000,000 dollars, or about £133,200,000, while the capital invested in banks, or in general commercial and industrial operations, might be safely estimated at over £30,000,000. Figures like these speak eloquently of the progress achieved in the three-quarters of a century that have elapsed since men gathered on the beach to wait the advent of the promised ship, and on the facts they reveal Chile might well rest a claim to universal regard and sympathy. But she can afford to rest that claim on far higher

grounds. She may fairly point to the pefectly pure, albeit somewhat dilatory, action of her courts of justice, the integrity of her administration, the general and willing obedience of her people to the law, and to the good sense of a community where men are content to busy themselves with their own concerns in preference to those of the State, and choose to live on the labour of their hands and brains rather than on the loaves and fishes of the public treasury. In these things Chile, adds Mr. Rumbold, stands nearly alone among South-American States, and accordingly should be classed apart from them.

NOTICES OF BOOKS.

Mesmerism, Spiritualism, &c., Historically and Scientifically Considered. Being Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution, with Preface and Appendix. By WILLIAM B. CARPENTER, C.B., M.D., F.R.S., &c., &c. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1877.

THE two lectures which Dr. Carpenter gave last year at the London Institution were generally reported by the press and led to some controversy. They were then published in Fraser's Magazine; and they are now re-published with what are considered to be piéces justificatives in an appendix. We may therefore fairly assume that the author has here said his best on the subject that he has carefully considered his facts and his arguments-and that he can give, in his own opinion at least, good reasons for omitting to notice certain matters which seem essential to a fair and impartial review of the whole question.

Dr. Carpenter enjoys the great advantage, which he well knows how to profit by, of being on the popular side, and of having been long before the public as an expounder of popular and educational science. Everything he writes is widely read; and his reiterated assurances that nobody's opinion and nobody's evidence on this particular subject is of the least value unless they have had a certain special early training (of which, it is pretty generally understood, Dr. Carpenter is one of the few living representatives) have convinced many people that what he tells them must be true and should therefore settle the whole matter. He has another advantage in the immense extent and complexity of the subject and the widely scattered and controversial nature of its literature. By ranging over this wide field and picking here and there a fact to support his views and a statement to damage his opponents, Dr. Carpenter has rendered it almost impossible to answer him on every point, without an amount of detail and research that would be repulsive to ordinary readers. It is necessary therefore to confine ourselves to the more important questions, where the facts are tolerably accessible and the matter can be brought to a definite issue; though, if space permitted, there is hardly a page of the book in which we should not find expressions calling for strong animadversion, as, for example, the unfounded and totally false general assertion at p. 6, that "believers in spiritualism make it a reproach against men of science that they entertain a prepossession in favour of the ascertained and universally admitted laws of nature." Vague general assertions of this kind, without a particle of proof offered or which can be offered, are alone suffi

cient to destroy the judicial or scientific claims of the work; but we have no intention of wasting space in further comment upon them.

Dr. Carpenter lays especial stress on his character of historian and man of science in relation to this enquiry. He parades this assumption in his title page and at the very commencement of his preface. He claims therefore to review the case as a judge, giving full weight to the evidence on both sides, and pronouncing an impartial and well-considered judgment. He may, indeed, believe that he has thus acted-for dominant ideas are very powerful-but any one tolerably acquainted with the literature and history of these subjects for the last thirty years, will most assuredly look upon this book as the work of an advocate rather than of a judge. In place of the impartial summary of the historian he will find the one-sided narrative of a partisan; and, instead of the careful weighing of fact and experiment characteristic of the man of science, he will find loose and inaccurate statements, and negative results set up as conclusive against positive evidence. We will now proceed to demonstrate the truth of this grave accusation, and shall in every case refer to the authorities by means of which our statements can be tested. The first example of Dr. Carpenter's "historical" mode of treating his subject which we shall adduce, is his account (pp. 13 to 15) of the rise of mesmerism in this country owing to the successful performance of many surgical operations without pain during the mesmeric trance. Dr. Carpenter writes of this as not only an admitted fact, but (so far as any word in his pages shows), as a fact which was admitted from the first, and which never went through that ordeal of denial, misrepresentation, and abuse by medical men and physiologists that other phenomena are still undergoing from a similar class of men. Yet Dr. Carpenter was in the thick of the fight and must know all about it. He must know that the greatest surgical and physiological authorities of that day-Sir Benjamin Brodie and Dr. Marshall Hall-opposed it with all the weight of their influence, accused the patients of imposture, or asserted that they might be "naturally insensible to pain," and spoke of the experiments of Dr. Elliotson and others as "trumpery," and as "polluting the temple of science." He must know, too, that Dr. Marshall Hall professed to demonstrate "physiologically" that the patients were impostors, because certain reflex-actions of the limbs which he declared ought to have occurred during the operations did not occur. The medical periodicals of the day were full of this, and a good summary may be found in Dr. Elliotson's "Surgical Operations without Pain, &c.," London, 1843. Dr. Carpenter tells us how his friends, Dr. Noble and Sir John Forbes, in 1845 accepted and wrote in favour of the reality of the facts; but it was hardly historical" to tell us this as the whole truth, when, for several years previously, the most violent controversy, abuse, and even

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